Volume 5 - Number 3 Explore this issue

Spring 2025 Issue

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In the Spring 2025 issue: Yaroslav Hrytsak on the surprising lessons of setting the Ukrainian war in the context of history; David Bell asks if we shouldn’t still believe in the enlightenment; Durs Grünbein shares cautionary echoes in prose and poetry; Clifford Thompson argues for reviving an honest view of race; Alfred Brendel notes some of the ungenteel qualities of Papa Haydn; Agnes Callard investigates what we see when we look at colors; Enrique Krauze explains what happens when a hunger for power destroyed a democracy; James Traub investigates journalism’s tangled relationship with truth; Jaroslaw Anders makes a cautionary tale from the the trajectory of Polish poetry; Gary Saul Morson warns of the danger of ready-made beliefs, and Kenda Mutongi of the use and abuse of magical thinking; Celeste Marcus asks what the American Jew owes her country; Leon Wieseltier muses on the slumber, and slow destruction, of liberalism in America and Israel; and poetry from David Grossman, Paula Bohince, and Karl Kirchwey.

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Thomas L. Friedman

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Mario Vargas Llosa

Liberties sure is needed in these times.

Bill Maher

Liberty is under threat and Liberties girds us for the fight.

George Stephanopuolos

Something was missing in our culture, and here it is.

Tina Brown

Invaluable.

David Brooks

Liberties: Some serious food for thought.

Christiane Amanpour

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Wynton Marsalis

A murderers row of important, fortifying, and inspiring writers.

Aaron Sorkin

Liberties opened my mind to subjects unfamiliar and points of view unexpected. I am hooked.

Ralph Fiennes

Podcast

Listen to Liberties on your favorite podcast service.

Salon Podcast

A monthly conversation during which Liberties Journals' Christopher McCaffery and Celeste Marcus talk with dozens of their closest friends about a question of pressing philosophical concern.
DC SALON 13

Can We Learn To Be Alone?

Liberties Journal's associate publisher, managing editor, and sixty of their closest friends together ask and answer the question "Can We Learn To Be Alone?" DC Salons are held monthly at the Liberties Offices in Washington, DC. Email [email protected] for more information.

DC SALON 12

Can People Change?

Christopher McCaffery, Celeste Marcus, and forty of their closest friends together ask and answer the question "Can People Change?"

Required Reading

On Required Reading we talk with writers and readers about the texts — old and new — that influence or express their worldview.
Ryan Ruby: Context Collapse

Ryan Ruby discusses his new book Context Collapse with Christopher McCaffery and Celeste Marcus.

Jessica Pishko and Celeste Marcus Discuss Immigration under Trump

What will immigration look like over the next four years?

Jessica Pishko and Celeste Marcus discuss what immigration policies will look like in the next Trump administration.

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Liberties Sidebar

How to Spell Syria

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June 2025

For many people, a country is a source of identity: a constant, a flag, a constitution. But what happens when you live through a revolution? What happens when your life cracks open at history’s fault line? Since the fall of Assad six months ago, Syrians have been engaged in deep, wide-ranging conversations about the future...

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Gaza and the Illusion of Escape

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June 2025

My family and I are victims of this bloody conflict. Please help us find a safe way out of Gaza and save my family. Please share this message. This short plea was written on a battered phone from a makeshift tent in one of Gaza’s displacement camps — by someone whose only wish is to...

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Ruins

by

June 2025

All matter doesn’t matter. Which is hard to believe  when two years I sat wedged  in a corner office stapling papers and prying them open. I was used to it. Used to  compiling edge to lascivious edge.  At week’s end I went to the cask like everyone else.  What I inhaled was the body asking...

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Teaching and Democracy in America

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June 2025

Every year, hundreds of thousands of college students enroll in a course whose title is something like “Principles of Comparative Politics” or “Introduction to Comparative Government.” These are bread-and-butter courses for any modern political science department, but they aren’t the flashy or sexy ones. Students who study government and political science normally come to these...

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Theater of Cruelty

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May 2025

I visited Manhattan during Labor Day Weekend, 2001, and then returned that November to find the area barricaded by plywood walls, and the walls fliered with the pictures of missing people.  Two years later a boiling dread roiled the March of 2003, as America’s futile and illegal invasion of Iraq had become inescapable. Years later...

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The Art of the Meal

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May 2025

A painter and a businessman, an emigre and an epicurean, W. Dieter Zander was an oddity typical of the shifting currents of the midcentury;  his collection of six hundred lovingly preserved restaurant menus at the New York Public Library is a monument to everything he sampled course-by-course during his mouth-watering life. However, the menus are...

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Woolfish Perception

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May 2025

Virginia Woolf might be at once the English novelist who is the most accomplished and the most shrugged off. The characters of Mrs Dalloway were never going to appear on cigarette cards, as Dickens’ characters did. Orlando even irritated Elizabeth Bowen (because it had too many in-jokes for Vita Sackville-West). Admirers must admit that, as...

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Podcast

Listen to Liberties on your favorite podcast service.

Salon Podcast

A monthly conversation during which Liberties Journals' Christopher McCaffery and Celeste Marcus talk with dozens of their closest friends about a question of pressing philosophical concern.
DC SALON 13

Can We Learn To Be Alone?

Liberties Journal's associate publisher, managing editor, and sixty of their closest friends together ask and answer the question "Can We Learn To Be Alone?" DC Salons are held monthly at the Liberties Offices in Washington, DC. Email [email protected] for more information.

DC SALON 12

Can People Change?

Christopher McCaffery, Celeste Marcus, and forty of their closest friends together ask and answer the question "Can People Change?"

Required Reading

On Required Reading we talk with writers and readers about the texts ��� old and new — that influence or express their worldview.
Ryan Ruby: Context Collapse

Ryan Ruby discusses his new book Context Collapse with Christopher McCaffery and Celeste Marcus.

Jessica Pishko and Celeste Marcus Discuss Immigration under Trump

What will immigration look like over the next four years?

Jessica Pishko and Celeste Marcus discuss what immigration policies will look like in the next Trump administration.

View All Podcasts



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